The main things which seem to me important on their own ... · friendship: she knows only love.”3...

6
222 mousse 32 ~ Reprint I have selected different types of fragments for re- print, that I am putting in relationship with each other, as is often the case in my practice. So that the cumulative sum of these things, words, ideas, some- how proposes something that each part alone could not; through this I speak, not so much through an individual authorial voice, but also through a multiplicity of voices. To try to say something, I try to think, and find my position through collect- ing and navigating through material; I also try and make work that speaks in the same way, that works by articulating a complexity of material, explicitly in both form and content. Perhaps this is a way of doing things that creates close ties and connec- tions between things, people, and myself, and that is something that more often than not has the feel of a friendship of sorts. I work by spending time with things I have collected, the references that I carry along, like friendly voices in my head, the numer- ous voices that are part of the process of thinking through and developing work —of friends, ac- quaintances and peers—but which also include the essential voices of inspirational thinkers from the past, that populate our thoughts and conversations and are in this way, also present. Friendship then, is perhaps a condition of work in my practice—even though it may never be the ac- tual subject of the work, however close it is to a long term object of my practice, support—but a forma- tive, operational condition that works on multiple, simultaneous levels. With this peculiar awareness in mind, I collected here material that exposes what it may mean to consider friendship as a condition for thinking, and does so through the specific friend- ship of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Much of the following thoughts and observations have developed in conversations with philosopher Johan Hartle, who very generously offered his knowledge and time to think with me. Also, a note: age thirty- seven, I decided to stop apologizing for being an in- tellectual and an artist. Friendship is a fundamental aspect of personal sup- port, a condition for doing thing stogether; I’d like to address it as a specific model of relationship in the large question of how to live and work together— and autonomously—towards change, as a way to act in the world. Friendship, like support, is con- sidered here as an essentially political relationship, one of allegiance and responsibility. Being a friend entails a commitment, a decision, and encompasses the implied positionings that any activity in culture entails. In relationship to my practice, friendship is, at its most relevant in relation to a labour process: as a way of working together. The line of thought that threads through the following material therefore, is that of friendship as a form of solidarity: friends in action. Also, as we know, working together can both start from and create forms of solidarity and/ or friendship, which are therefore pursued as both condition and intent, motivating actions taken and allowing work undertaken. There is in Hannah Arendt a concept of culture that is, to my view, close to what I would call friendship as outlined above: she defines it as “the company that one chooses to keep, in the present as well as in the past.” 2 She quotes Cicero saying he ’d rather go astray with Plato, than hold the truth with Py- thagoras; what he means by this, I imagine, is that he prefers the company of Plato than a so-called truth, especially if proclamated by a bore like Pythagoras. The politics of such a judgement are of an alliance, of whom one would rather be with. The word friend- ship does not actually appear in her text, and the company one keeps as I understand it is neither the exclusive group of friends nor the production of life, but cultura animi, a kind of humanism. In this way the choices and alliances that we make all the time, (like which books to read and refer to, or whom to work and think with) are instrumental in the forma- tion of culture. I find this notion of friendship and/ or culture quite empowering, perhaps even liberat- ing, and I was interested in not just understanding it in general, abstract terms, but through the specific situation of Arendt’s friendship with McCarthy, tak- ing place and speaking to me through twenty-five years of letters they exchanged, and numerous books and publications that they helped each other with. The ancient tradition defines friendship as an ex- ercise in freedom, which needs to be exercised in freedom, meaning exclusively by and with free and equal subjects. As usual, such a freedom is defined negatively: freedom from oppression, coercion, from unreasonable external constraints on action, but also from affects and inclination, from the slav- ery of desires etc. However, jurisdictional equality is what counts – so that in a world in which women and slaves are not considered part of the polis, of the democratic space of the city, but just occupy the physical space of it, then friendship can only take place amongst men. Which means that according to that tradition, freedoms like friendship can only be exercised by free men, and that in a world in which women are subaltern, they cannot be addressed in friendship, and are therefore also excluded from its discourse. As the discourse around friendship is born and develops in ancient Greece, where women and slaves are excluded from democracy, this rather heavy footnote is bizarrely carried through the his- tory of philosophy all the way—but only sometimes consciously so— until it reaches us; so that this discourse, like many things, replicates the same ex- clusions it was born in. Hannah Arendt—the only woman on the philosophers’ shelf—revives the polis model of freedom and places politics in the realm of action (what she calls vita activa, active life), but in her terms separates it from labour (the production of humanity’s own survival) and work (the construc- tion of the material world). She doesn’t explicitly ex- clude slaves or women from the space of democracy, but neither does she include them; and she continues to disqualify what has traditionally been attributed to women and slaves: sensuousness and materiality. So I started visiting the—small but rich—philo- sophical discourse on friendship, through Aristotle, Montaigne, Derrida, Agamben, and Blanchot, and found that it is a discourse of friendship amongst men. It is shocking how powerful these definitions still are in modern philosophy; Nietzsche argues like this: “Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends. All-too long have a slave and a tyrant been concealed in woman. Therefore woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.” 3 Derrida does ad- dress this problem in one chapter of The Politics of Friendship, and yet the issue remains: no women phi- losophers have written about friendship, to the best of my knowledge, and more crucially, there seems to be something inherently patriarchal, perhaps fratri- archal about these constructions of friendship, that are based on the idea of a nation of brothers (and the terrifying notion that we can only live together because we are the same, we share the same land, the same birth, the same blood, the same language, etc). Simple, haunting questions emerge from this: can I use a discourse that excludes me, and how? Should I produce my own? And how would a discourse on friendship that includes women be structured? So Nietzsche says: not yet. What is the yet to be reached? Which qualification does woman need to fulfill in order to graduate to the capacity for friend- ship? And how about the friendship that women and slaves could have together and with each other? Free- dom from affects begs another question: I could nev- er accept Socrates’ decision that women should not be present at his death because they would be over- emotional. Why should affect not be part of how to die? And why should the discourse of philosophy, that one imagines is what Socrates wanted to die sur- rounded by, be free from affects? I guess we know that this could never really be the case, but what kind of freedom does the exclusion of desires propose? Sure- ly there is also a desire for freedom in freedom too? So one question is concerned with the possibility of friendship between men and women, and of course between women themselves within philosphical dis- course. But another question, which is perhaps more constructive, is to think less of the whys of exclusion, and instead focus on how to produce an inclusive dis- course on friendship, or how to include women, as well as the territories historically attributed to them like affects and materiality, in a discourse on friend- ship. For this to happen I needed to think through how friendship, as a relationship, takes place. Johan Hartle responded to this saying that “friend- ship is an affectionate relationship in and through which humans mutually increase their potentia agen- REPRINT BY CéLINE CONDORELLI The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinc- tive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection. 1 What is friendship? A vital alliance, a sharing of acts and thoughts, an exercise in freedom. Céline Condorelli explores the territory of elective affinities, tracing back to the classical roots of thinking about friendship and rediscovering, in the relation- ship between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, the prototype of a friendship ca- pable of incrementing the potentia agendi of the individual. The French artist tells us the story of how Hannah and Mary met, through their letters and writings, reveal- ing the inner nature of a friendship capable of defying death.

Transcript of The main things which seem to me important on their own ... · friendship: she knows only love.”3...

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I have selected different types of fragments for re-print, that I am putting in relationship with each other, as is often the case in my practice. So that the cumulative sum of these things, words, ideas, some-how proposes something that each part alone could not; through this I speak, not so much through an individual authorial voice, but also through a multiplicity of voices. To try to say something, I try to think, and find my position through collect-ing and navigating through material; I also try and make work that speaks in the same way, that works by articulating a complexity of material, explicitly in both form and content. Perhaps this is a way of doing things that creates close ties and connec-tions between things, people, and myself, and that is something that more often than not has the feel of a friendship of sorts. I work by spending time with things I have collected, the references that I carry along, like friendly voices in my head, the numer-ous voices that are part of the process of thinking through and developing work —of friends, ac-quaintances and peers—but which also include the essential voices of inspirational thinkers from the past, that populate our thoughts and conversations and are in this way, also present.

Friendship then, is perhaps a condition of work in my practice—even though it may never be the ac-tual subject of the work, however close it is to a long term object of my practice, support—but a forma-tive, operational condition that works on multiple, simultaneous levels. With this peculiar awareness in mind, I collected here material that exposes what it may mean to consider friendship as a condition for thinking, and does so through the specific friend-ship of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Much of the following thoughts and observations have developed in conversations with philosopher Johan Hartle, who very generously offered his knowledge and time to think with me. Also, a note: age thirty-seven, I decided to stop apologizing for being an in-tellectual and an artist. Friendship is a fundamental aspect of personal sup-port, a condition for doing thing stogether; I’d like to address it as a specific model of relationship in the large question of how to live and work together—and autonomously—towards change, as a way to act in the world. Friendship, like support, is con-sidered here as an essentially political relationship, one of allegiance and responsibility. Being a friend entails a commitment, a decision, and encompasses the implied positionings that any activity in culture entails. In relationship to my practice, friendship is, at its most relevant in relation to a labour process: as a way of working together. The line of thought that threads through the following material therefore, is that of friendship as a form of solidarity: friends in action. Also, as we know, working together can

both start from and create forms of solidarity and/or friendship, which are therefore pursued as both condition and intent, motivating actions taken and allowing work undertaken.

There is in Hannah Arendt a concept of culture that is, to my view, close to what I would call friendship as outlined above: she defines it as “the company that one chooses to keep, in the present as well as in the past.”2 She quotes Cicero saying he ’d rather go astray with Plato, than hold the truth with Py-thagoras; what he means by this, I imagine, is that he prefers the company of Plato than a so-called truth, especially if proclamated by a bore like Pythagoras. The politics of such a judgement are of an alliance, of whom one would rather be with. The word friend-ship does not actually appear in her text, and the company one keeps as I understand it is neither the exclusive group of friends nor the production of life, but cultura animi, a kind of humanism. In this way the choices and alliances that we make all the time, (like which books to read and refer to, or whom to work and think with) are instrumental in the forma-tion of culture. I find this notion of friendship and/or culture quite empowering, perhaps even liberat-ing, and I was interested in not just understanding it in general, abstract terms, but through the specific situation of Arendt’s friendship with McCarthy, tak-ing place and speaking to me through twenty-five years of letters they exchanged, and numerous books and publications that they helped each other with.

The ancient tradition defines friendship as an ex-ercise in freedom, which needs to be exercised in freedom, meaning exclusively by and with free and equal subjects. As usual, such a freedom is defined negatively: freedom from oppression, coercion, from unreasonable external constraints on action, but also from affects and inclination, from the slav-ery of desires etc. However, jurisdictional equality is what counts – so that in a world in which women and slaves are not considered part of the polis, of the democratic space of the city, but just occupy the physical space of it, then friendship can only take place amongst men. Which means that according to that tradition, freedoms like friendship can only be exercised by free men, and that in a world in which women are subaltern, they cannot be addressed in friendship, and are therefore also excluded from its discourse. As the discourse around friendship is born and develops in ancient Greece, where women and slaves are excluded from democracy, this rather heavy footnote is bizarrely carried through the his-tory of philosophy all the way—but only sometimes consciously so— until it reaches us; so that this discourse, like many things, replicates the same ex-clusions it was born in. Hannah Arendt—the only woman on the philosophers’ shelf—revives the polis model of freedom and places politics in the realm of

action (what she calls vita activa, active life), but in her terms separates it from labour (the production of humanity’s own survival) and work (the construc-tion of the material world). She doesn’t explicitly ex-clude slaves or women from the space of democracy, but neither does she include them; and she continues to disqualify what has traditionally been attributed to women and slaves: sensuousness and materiality. So I started visiting the—small but rich—philo-sophical discourse on friendship, through Aristotle, Montaigne, Derrida, Agamben, and Blanchot, and found that it is a discourse of friendship amongst men. It is shocking how powerful these definitions still are in modern philosophy; Nietzsche argues like this: “Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends. All-too long have a slave and a tyrant been concealed in woman. Therefore woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.”3 Derrida does ad-dress this problem in one chapter of The Politics of Friendship, and yet the issue remains: no women phi-losophers have written about friendship, to the best of my knowledge, and more crucially, there seems to be something inherently patriarchal, perhaps fratri-archal about these constructions of friendship, that are based on the idea of a nation of brothers (and the terrifying notion that we can only live together because we are the same, we share the same land, the same birth, the same blood, the same language, etc). Simple, haunting questions emerge from this: can I use a discourse that excludes me, and how? Should I produce my own? And how would a discourse on friendship that includes women be structured?

So Nietzsche says: not yet. What is the yet to be reached? Which qualification does woman need to fulfill in order to graduate to the capacity for friend-ship? And how about the friendship that women and slaves could have together and with each other? Free-dom from affects begs another question: I could nev-er accept Socrates’ decision that women should not be present at his death because they would be over-emotional. Why should affect not be part of how to die? And why should the discourse of philosophy, that one imagines is what Socrates wanted to die sur-rounded by, be free from affects? I guess we know that this could never really be the case, but what kind of freedom does the exclusion of desires propose? Sure-ly there is also a desire for freedom in freedom too?

So one question is concerned with the possibility of friendship between men and women, and of course between women themselves within philosphical dis-course. But another question, which is perhaps more constructive, is to think less of the whys of exclusion, and instead focus on how to produce an inclusive dis-course on friendship, or how to include women, as well as the territories historically attributed to them like affects and materiality, in a discourse on friend-ship. For this to happen I needed to think through how friendship, as a relationship, takes place.Johan Hartle responded to this saying that “friend-ship is an affectionate relationship in and through which humans mutually increase their potentia agen-

REPRINTB y C é l I N E C o N D o R E l l I

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinc-tive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.1

What is friendship? A vital alliance, a sharing of acts and thoughts, an exercise in freedom. Céline Condorelli explores the territory of elective affinities, tracing back to the classical roots of thinking about friendship and rediscovering, in the relation-ship between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, the prototype of a friendship ca-pable of incrementing the potentia agendi of the individual. The French artist tells us the story of how Hannah and Mary met, through their letters and writings, reveal-ing the inner nature of a friendship capable of defying death.

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Letter to Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, June 14, 1958, Florence.Courtesy of Vassar College Library

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di, their vital capacities. Spinoza sees, in a classically philosophical way, friendship’s highest potential in the communal development of the intellect. But the intellect here just functions to differentiate and de-velop the body and its affects. Spinoza’s approach to friendship is to some extent exceptional, as he does not accept any ontological separation between mind and body. The formation of the common or the res publica is, in that sense, as much an agreement in terms of bodies as it is in terms of intellects. In this way, the construction of a people is the construction of shared affects.

“one must therefore also con-sent that his friend exists” I read, “and this happens by living together and by sharing acts and thoughts in common. In this sense, we say that humans live together, unlike cattle that share the pasture together...”4

I really like and am drawn to the idea of living to-gether and sharing acts and thoughts in common, in a way that what is shared is not things, objects, prop-erty, qualities (being brothers, men, French, artists, or whatever) but an activity, a process of coexistence through doing and thinking. What this proposes is a process of association that remains open as to what or whom may partake in it. Furthermore, could a woman speak in friendship? And in that way over-come the structure of classical philosophical dis-course by occupying it, and acting within it? If we were to engage in the work of friendship this could lead to what Arendt recalls in her friend Mary Mc-Carthy: “It’s not that we think so much alike, but that we do this thinking-business for and with each other.” The thinking-business is work in friendship, and friendship in work.

So the next few pages gather fragments of what that friendship consisted of, that originate from different places, books and archives, and open up moments of the thinking-business in terms of a common produc-tion. It starts with a letter written by Mary in which she responds to Hannah’s definitions of work by offering the clues given by Italian language. Most inspiring for me perhaps, that while lavoro is work, opera is the oeuvre, in some instances even a great work, yet operaio is the (factory) worker. It is be-tween opera and operaio that I suspect there may be something useful for us, relating work and labour with both object and subject. In the term coopera-tion we also have the opus (opera), that announces a production beyond labour (which in latin means suffering). I have then included the very last lines of “The Crisis in Culture”, that for me root friendship in the production of culture, a text I first encoun-tered thanks to Jeremiah Day in our weekly Arendt seminars (to the amused disbelief of staff and fellow residents) while on residency at Platform Garanti Istanbul in 2008. Following this is a spread from Mc-Carthy’s Postface to the Life of the Mind, Arendt’s unfinished book that was put together by her life-long friend made literary executioner, which ar-ticulates so poignantly how this work in friendship continues in her absence, with her absence. Finally, a spread from Thinking in Dark Times, a beautiful book given to me by Elizabeth Felicella, with on ei-ther side of the page, different aspects of this com-munal development of the intellect, or put more simply, what it means to act in friendship.

1. Quoted from Bertrand Russell.

2. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political

Significance”, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political

Thought, Faber and Faber, london, 1961, p. 226.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and

None, 1883-1885.

4. Giorgio Agamben, The Friend, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 33.

D I C é l I N E C o N D o R E l l I

Che cos’è l’amicizia? Un’alleanza vitale, una condivisione di atti e

pensieri, un esercizio di libertà. Céline Condorelli perlustra il

territorio delle affinità elettive, risalendo alle origini classichedella riflessione sull’amicizia e

ritrovando, nel rapporto tra HannahArendt e Mary McCarthy, il prototipo

di un’amicizia capace diaccrescere la potentia agendi

dell’individuo. L’artista francese ciracconta la storia dell’incontro tra Hannah e Mary attraverso le lorolettere e i loro scritti, rivelando

l’intima natura di un’amicizia ingrado di resistere alla morte.

Le cose principali che mi sembrano importanti in sé, e non semplicemente come mezzi per altre cose, sono la conoscenza, l’arte, la felicità istintiva, e le relazioni amicali o affettive.1

Ho selezionato diversi tipi di frammenti per “Re-print”, mettendoli in relazione gli uni agli altri, come spesso faccio nella mia pratica. In modo che la somma cumulativa di queste cose, parole e idee, in qualche modo, proponga qualcosa che ciascuna parte da sola non potrebbe; in questo modo parlo, non tanto con una voce autoriale individuale, ma attraverso una molteplicità di voci. Nel tentativo di dire qualcosa, provo a pensare a come trovare una mia posizione, mettendo insieme e navigando attra-verso il materiale; tento anche di fare un lavoro che parli nello stesso modo, che funzioni articolando una complessità di materiali, sia nella forma che nel con-tenuto. Forse questo modo di agire crea stretti lega-mi e connessioni fra le cose, le persone e me stessa, ed è qualcosa che assomiglia a una sorta di amicizia. lavoro passando del tempo con le cose che ho colle-zionato, le fonti che mi porto dietro, come voci ami-chevoli in testa, innumerevoli voci che fanno parte del processo di riflessione e di sviluppo del lavoro – voci di amici, conoscenti e colleghi – ma anche voci fondamentali di pensatori del passato che ci ispirano e popolano i nostri pensieri e le nostre conversazio-ni, e che sono, in questo modo, a lora volta presenti.

l’amicizia, allora, è forse una condizione di lavoro nella mia pratica – sebbene non possa mai essere il vero e proprio soggetto del lavoro, per quanto sia vicina a un importante oggetto del mio lavoro, il sostegno – ma sicuramente una condizione forma-tiva, operativa che funziona su livelli molteplici e simultanei. Con questa particolare consapevolezza in mente, ho collezionato, per quest’occasione, ma-teriale che rivela cosa possa significare considerare l’amicizia come condizione di pensiero, e lo faccio attraverso la particolare amicizia tra Hannah Arendt e Mary McCarthy.Molti dei pensieri e delle osservazioni che seguono si sono sviluppati in conversazioni con il filosofo Johan Hartle che, molto generosamente, ha offerto la sua conoscenza e il suo tempo per riflettere con me. Ag-giungo una nota: all’età di 37 anni ho deciso di smet-tere di scusarmi di essere un’intellettuale e un artista.

l’amicizia è un aspetto fondamentale del sostegno personale, una condizione per agire insieme; vorrei

occuparmene come se fosse un modello specifico di relazione nella più ampia questione sul come vivere e lavorare insieme – e autonomamente – per il cambia-mento, come modalità d’azione nel mondo. l’amici-zia, come il sostegno, è in quest’occasione considerata come una relazione essenzialmente politica, di allean-za e responsabilità. offrire amicizia richiede un impe-gno, una decisione, e riguarda le relazioni che qual-siasi attività culturale implica. In relazione alla mia pratica, l’amicizia è soprattutto legata a un processo operativo: un modo di lavorare insieme. la linea di pensiero che attraversa il materiale che segue quindi, è quella dell’amicizia come forma di solidarietà: amici in azione. Inoltre, come sappiamo, lavorare insieme può sia originare che creare forme di solidarietà e/o amicizia, le quali vengono quindi perseguite sia come condizione che come fine, motivando le azioni intra-prese e facilitando il lavoro che si porta avanti.

C’è in Hannah Arendt un concetto di cultura che, dal mio punto di vista, si avvicina a ciò che chiamo amicizia come descritta poco sopra: lei la defini-sce come “la compagnia che si sceglie di avere, nel presente così come nel passato”2. Arendt cita Ci-cerone quando dice che preferirebbe perdersi con Platone piuttosto che possedere la verità con Pita-gora; quello che credo significhi, è che egli preferi-sce la compagnia di Platone a una presunta verità, specialmente se proclamata dal noioso Pitagora. l'idea alla base di tale giudizio è quella di un’alle-anza, con chi si preferisce stare. la parola amicizia in realtà non appare nel testo di Arendt, e la com-pagnia che uno sceglie, per come la vedo io, non è né il gruppo esclusivo di amici né la produzione di una vita, ma cultura animi, un tipo di umanesimo. In questo modo le alleanze e le scelte che facciamo con-tinuamente, (come per esempio quali libri leggere e avere come punti di riferimento, o con chi lavorare e pensare) sono strumentali alla formazione della cultura. Trovo che questa nozione di amicizia e/o cultura conferisca potere e sia perfino liberatoria. Mi sono interessata alla sua comprensione non solo in termini generali, astratti, ma attraverso la specifica situazione di amicizia fra Hannah Arendt e Mary McCarthy, che mi parlava attraverso i 25 anni di lettere che le due si sono scambiate, i numerosi libri e pubblicazioni con cui si sono aiutate l’un l’altra.

l’antica tradizione definisce l’amicizia come un eser-cizio di libertà che necessita di essere esercitato in libertà, e cioè esclusivamente da e tra soggetti liberi ed eguali. Come al solito, una libertà di questo tipo è definita negativamente: libertà dall’oppressione, dal-la coercizione, da irragionevoli costrizioni esterne sulle proprie azioni, ma anche dalle emozioni e dalle inclinazioni, dalla schiavitù dei desideri ecc. Tut-tavia, l’uguaglianza giurisdizionale è ciò che conta – quindi in un mondo in cui le donne e gli schiavi non siano considerati parte della polis, lo spazio de-mocratico della città, ma ne occupino solo lo spazio fisico, l’amicizia può avere luogo solo fra gli uomini. Ciò significa che secondo quella tradizione, la liber-tà, come l’amicizia, può essere esercitata solo da uo-mini liberi, e che, in un mondo in cui le donne siano subalterne, esse non possono dedicarsi all’amicizia, e quindi sono anche escluse dalla sua discussione. Dal momento che la discussione sull’amicizia è nata e si è sviluppata nell’antica Grecia, dove le donne e gli schiavi sono esclusi dalla democrazia, questa pesante nota a margine si è stranamente mantenuta attraverso la storia della filosofia – ma solo sporadi-camente in maniera consapevole – fino a noi; cosic-ché questa discussione, come molte altre cose, repli-ca le medesime esclusioni del contesto in cui è nata. Hannah Arendt – la sola donna sullo scaffale dei fi-losofi – rianima il modello di libertà della polis e col-

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Top – Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance”, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Faber and Faber, London, 1961, p.226

Above – Postface by Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978)

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loca la politica nel reame dell’azione (ciò che chia-ma vita activa), ma la separa dal lavoro manuale (la produzione della stessa sopravvivenza dell’umanità) e dal lavoro (la costruzione del mondo materiale). Arendt non esclude esplicitamente gli schiavi e le donne dallo spazio della democrazia, ma neppure ve li include; e continua a squalificare ciò che è stato tradizionalmente attribuito alle donne e agli schiavi: la sensualità e la materialità.

Così ho iniziato ad affrontare il discorso filosofico – limitato ma denso – sull’amicizia, attraverso Ari-stotele, Montaigne, Derrida, Agamben, e Blanchot, e ho scoperto che è un discorso di amicizia fra uo-mini. È scioccante il potere che queste definizioni ancora hanno nella moderna filosofia; Nietzsche ar-gomenta in questo modo: “Sei uno schiavo? Allora non puoi essere un amico. Sei un tiranno? Allora non puoi avere amici. Per troppo tempo si celò nel-la donna uno schiavo e un tiranno. Perciò la donna non è ancora capace di amicizia: essa conosce solo l’amore”3. Derrida affronta questo problema in uno dei capitoli de Le politiche dell’amicizia, e tuttavia il problema rimane: nessuna donna filosofo ha scrit-to sull’amicizia, per quanto ne so, e, cosa ancor più importante, sembra esserci qualcosa di inerente-mente patriarcale, forse fratriarcale in queste inter-pretazioni dell’amicizia, che sono basate sull’idea di una nazione di fratelli (e sulla nozione terrificante che possiamo vivere insieme solo perché siamo gli stessi, dividiamo la stessa terra, la stessa nascita, lo stesso sangue, la stessa lingua, ecc.). Ne emergono interrogativi semplici e ineludibili: posso servirmi di un discorso che mi esclude, e come? Posso pro-durne uno mio? E come sarebbe strutturata una di-scussione sull’amicizia che includa le donne?

Nietzsche sostiene: non ancora. Cosa c’è ancora da raggiungere? Quali qualifiche la donna deve soddisfare al fine di acquisire la capacità amicale? E cosa dire riguardo all’amicizia che le donne e gli schiavi potrebbero stringere fra loro e le une con gli altri? la libertà dalle emozioni introduce un’ul-teriore questione: non avrei mai potuto accettare la decisione di Socrate per cui le donne non dovevano essere presenti alla sua morte perché troppo emo-tive. Perché l’emozione non dovrebbe essere parte di come morire? E perché il discorso filosofico, che c’immaginiamo essere ciò di cui Socrate voglia es-sere circondato nel momento della morte, dovrebbe essere scevro dalle emozioni? Credo che sappiamo che questo non potrebbe mai essere il caso, ma che tipo di libertà propone l’esclusione dei desideri? Ci deve anche essere necessariamente un desiderio di libertà nella libertà?

Quindi una domanda riguarda la possibilità dell’a-micizia fra uomini e donne, e ovviamente fra le donne stesse all’interno della discussione filosofica. Ma un’altra domanda, che è forse più costruttiva, è quella di pensare meno ai motivi dell’esclusione, e focalizzarsi piuttosto sul modo in cui dare vita a una discussione inclusiva sull’amicizia, o sul modo in cui annettervi le donne, così come i territori sto-ricamente loro attribuiti, come gli affetti e la mate-rialità. Affinché questo avvenga, ho avuto bisogno di pensare a lungo a come l’amicizia, in quanto rela-zione, abbia luogo.

Johan Hartle risponde dicendo che “l’amicizia è una relazione affettiva nella quale, e attraverso la quale, gli esseri umani aumentano reciprocamente la loro potentia agendi, le loro capacità vitali. Spi-noza vede, in un modo classicamente filosofico, la più alta potenzialità dell’amicizia nello sviluppo comunitario dell’intelletto. Ma l’intelletto qui fun-

Page 6: The main things which seem to me important on their own ... · friendship: she knows only love.”3 Derrida does ad-dress this problem in one chapter of The Politics of Friendship,

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ziona proprio a differenziare e sviluppare il corpo e le sue emozioni. l’approccio di Spinoza all’amicizia è, in un certo senso, eccezionale, dal momento che egli non accetta alcuna separazione ontologica tra mente e corpo. la formazione della cosa comune o della res publica è, in quel senso, tanto un accordo in termini di corpi quanto lo è in termini d’intelletti. In questo modo la costruzione di una nazione è la costruzione di emozioni condivise”.“Si deve quindi anche consentire che la sua amicizia esista”, leggo, “e questo succede vivendo insieme e condividendo atti e pensieri. In questo senso dicia-mo che gli esseri umani convivono, non diversamen-te dal bestiame che spartisce il pascolo...”4

Amo veramente e mi attrae l’idea del convivere e del condividere atti e pensieri, in modo che ciò che è condiviso non siano cose, oggetti, proprietà, qua-lità (essere fratelli, uomini, francesi, artisti, o qual-sivoglia altra qualità) ma un’attività, un processo di coesistenza attraverso il fare e il pensare. Ciò che questa definizione propone è un processo di associa-zione che rimane aperto e guarda a cosa o a chi possa prenderne parte. Inoltre, una donna potrebbe par-lare in amicizia? E quindi superare la struttura della discussione filosofica classica, appropriandosene, e agendo al suo interno? Se dobbiamo impegnarci nel lavoro dell’amicizia questo potrebbe condurre a ciò che Arendt ricorda della sua amica Mary McCarthy: “Non è che la pensiamo così tanto in maniera simile, ma piuttosto che compiamo l’attività di pensare l’u-na per l’altra e l’una con l’altra”. l’attività di pensare è l’amicizia fattiva, l’amicizia in azione.

Quindi, le prossime pagine raccolgono frammenti di ciò di cui consiste l’amicizia, che originano da luo-ghi, libri e archivi diversi, e rivelano momenti del lavoro del pensiero nel senso di produzione comune. Inizio con una lettera scritta da Mary in cui risponde alle definizioni di lavoro di Hannah, offrendo i corri-spettivi nella lingua italiana. la cosa di maggior ispi-razione per me, forse, è che, mentre lavoro è “work” e opera è “oeuvre”, per certi versi un lavoro anche maggiore, operaio è “factory worker”. È fra opera e operaio che sospetto ci possa essere qualcosa di utile per noi, mettendo in relazione lavoro e lavoro manuale sia con l’oggetto che col soggetto. Anche nel termine cooperazione abbiamo l’opus (opera), che annuncia una produzione oltre il lavoro manuale (il cui corrispettivo latino labor significa sofferenza). Ho poi incluso proprio le ultime frasi de “la crisi della cultura”, che per me radicano l’amicizia nella produzione della cultura, un testo che ho incontrato per la prima volta grazie a Jeremiah Day nei nostri seminari settimanali su Arendt (per la divertita in-credulità dello staff e dei colleghi residenti) mentre eravamo in residenza a Platform Garanti Istanbul nel 2008. A seguire, un estratto dalla postfazione di McCarthy a La vita della mente, il libro non finito di Arendt, messo insieme dall’amica di una vita e sua esecutrice letteraria, che articola in maniera intensa come questo lavoro in amicizia continui in sua as-senza, con la sua assenza. Infine, un estratto da L’u-manità in tempi bui, un bel libro datomi da Elizabeth Felicella, che racconta su entrambi i lati della pagina, differenti aspetti di questo sviluppo comune dell’in-telletto, o per dirla più semplicemente, che cosa si-gnifichi agire nell’amicizia.

1. Citazione da Bertrand Russell.2. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance”, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Faber and Faber, londra 1961, p. 226.3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Così parlò Zarathustra, a cura di Giorgio Colli e Mazzino Montinari, tr. di Mazzino Montinari, Adelphi, Milano 1968 (Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, Ernst Schmeitz-ner 1883-1885).4. Giorgio Agamben, L’amico, Nottetempo, Roma 2007.

Thinking in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt on Ethicsand Politics,edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz,and Thomas Keenan, Fordham University Press, 2009